Mirko Novakovic, CEO and co-founder. Co-founded codecentric, a German IT consultancy that grew to around 500 people, then in April 2015 co-founded Instana with Pete Abrams, Fabian Lange and Pavlo Baron, raising from Target Partners, Accel and Meritech before IBM acquired it in November 2020 (he has cited a $500M figure); he stayed as VP Hybrid Cloud Management and Watson AIOps at IBM until 2021. He has angel-invested in more than 70 B2B SaaS startups through New Forge, and studied information technology at Berufsakademie Stuttgart and SMB management at the University of St. Gallen.
Ben Blackmore, CTO and co-founder. Spent six years at Instana leading frontend architecture, growing its UI community to over 80 contributors, building distributed tracing and ingestion systems and leading the real user monitoring product, then was a staff engineer at Steadybit; he and Novakovic have worked together since codecentric. He studied software engineering at Fontys University of Applied Sciences in Venlo, where he still serves as an external expert.
Michele Mancioppi, Chief Architect, Head of Open Source and Community, co-founder. Staff engineer at SAP leading a company-wide observability effort for SAP Cloud Platform, then Senior Technical Product Manager at Instana owning the agent and distributed tracing, then product manager for observability at Canonical and Lumigo. He is an OpenTelemetry maintainer, co-created OTelBin, and holds a PhD from Tilburg University (2015).
Miel Donkers, Founding engineer and Principal Software Engineer. Software craftsman at codecentric Nederland, senior engineer at Instana and IBM after the acquisition, then principal cloud engineer at ClickHouse; at Dash0 he owns backend systems and the OpenTelemetry and Prometheus integrations.
Marcel Birkner, Founding engineer and Head of Platform Engineering. Software consultant at codecentric, staff site reliability engineer at Instana from 2018 to 2021 through the IBM acquisition, then SRE at ClickHouse; at Dash0 he architects and operates the infrastructure behind the platform.